The Daughters of Erietown Read online

“Just because you can drive Harry’s truck now doesn’t mean you’re anything like Harry. Your brother-in-law had no business holding on to that truck for you. It should’ve been mine after Harry died.”

  Brick’s shoulder was on fire. He tried to wriggle out of the hold, but Bull grabbed harder and pushed Brick’s wrist up toward the back of his neck. “You think your shit don’t stink. Cuz you’re bigger’n me, cuz you’re a big basketball star in this nothing town. I’m your daddy and nothin’ you can do will ever change that. You show some respect, or I’ll beat the shit out of you until you scream for your mommy. Make you pee like a little boy again.”

  Brick’s eyes began to sting.

  “You hear me?”

  Brick gritted his teeth and said nothing.

  “Answer me,” Bull said, twisting his arm harder.

  “Bull!”

  Brick heard the clothes basket drop to the floor and the clack of his mother’s shoes against the linoleum as she ran to wedge herself between her son and her husband. She was two inches taller than Bull, and at least twenty pounds heavier. She flattened her palms against Bull’s chest. “Bull. Stop.”

  “This don’t concern you, Angie,” Bull growled, but Brick could tell by the lightening weight against his back that his father had taken a step back. “Go back to your laundry.”

  Angie McGinty did not move. “He’s getting ready for school,” she said, her arms extended behind her now to embrace Brick’s waist. “He can’t miss any more days if he’s going to stay on the team. Let him be.”

  “The team,” Bull said, laughing. “Do you hear yourself? It ain’t a job, Angie. It’s a bunch of pansy-ass boys chasing a little ball.” Brick slid out from behind his mother and turned to face them, as his father pointed at him and said, “That boy of yours gave me back talk. He pays for that. No son of mine is gonna mouth off to me.”

  Angie’s eyes were riveted on Bull as she spoke. “Brick, apologize to your father.”

  “I’m not the one who did anything wrong,” Brick yelled.

  “You sonnuvabitch.”

  “Please, Son,” Angie said. “Just say you’re sorry. Say it for me.”

  Brick squeezed his eyes shut and flexed his hands. Open, closed. Open, closed.

  “Say you’re sorry, honey. He’ll leave us alone if you just say you’re sorry.”

  Brick hated that she was right.

  “All right, Ma,” he said. “For you.” He glared at Bull as he slid his mother’s hands off his shoulders. “I’m sorry.”

  “Dad,” Bull said. “I’m sorry, Dad.”

  Angie patted her son’s back.

  “I’m sorry, Dad,” Brick said, his face a map of contempt. Bull lunged and Brick tumbled backward onto the floor. “You just remember who’s boss, mama’s boy,” Bull said, pinning Brick’s shoulders to the floor as he spit on Brick’s face. “You just remember who’s the man in this house.”

  Bull swatted Angie’s grip off of his shirt. “You, too,” he said, snapping his ball cap on and pulling open the door.

  The door slammed, and Bull was gone.

  Angie grabbed the wet dishrag hanging on the cold-water faucet and held on to the oven door handle as she eased herself down onto her knees next to Brick. “Let me get a look at that,” she said, reaching for the cut over his eye.

  “No, Ma,” Brick said, rising to his feet. He held out his hand and pulled his mother up. She handed him the rag and he wiped the spittle from his face, rinsed the rag out, and dabbed at his eye.

  “Brick, you need to put ice on that. It’s already starting to swell.”

  “I don’t want any ice,” he said. He looked at the bloody rag and threw it into the sink. Several drops of blood drew a scarlet line down the side of his freckled face. How many times? Angela McGinty wondered. How many times would this happen to her boy before he left for good?

  Brick was her second son, her only living boy, the youngest of twelve. She’d almost died after the birth of her tenth child, Margaret. “This has to be your last, Angie,” Dr. Stevens told her before he discharged her from the hospital. “Your next child won’t have a mother to hold on to.”

  Having no more children meant saying no to Bull McGinty, and nobody did that in his house, especially when he came home drunk. She had Louise at age thirty-six, and got pregnant again before the baby was six months old. Brick was born on Thanksgiving Day in 1938, all ten pounds, seven ounces of him.

  Brick was all hers, from the day he was born. Bull had insisted on naming the boy Richard, for a drinking buddy from his jazz band days, but Bull was nowhere to be found when it was time to sign the birth certificate. She wrote in Paull for his middle name, after her only brother, who had died of tuberculosis when he was fourteen.

  By the time he was three, everyone called him Brick because of his red hair and tank of a build. He was seventeen now and still called Brick, but for different reasons. Brick was six feet two, a towering brawn of a man, and a relentless target of her husband’s rage ever since their oldest son, Harry, was killed in World War II.

  She kept the Navy’s telegram informing her of Harry’s death wrapped in a hankie in the top drawer of her dresser. The Western Union had spelled his name wrong—MacGinty, instead of McGinty—but she couldn’t part with the letter because it was the last time she ever opened an envelope thinking her beautiful Harry was still alive.

  Almost overnight, Bull turned on Brick. Angie always thought it was because his face looked so much like Harry’s. Same red hair and freckles, same ice-blue eyes, but Brick was different from Harry. Bigger boned, and less easygoing. By the time he was fourteen, Brick was two inches taller than Bull. At fifteen, he took his first swing to defend himself. Bull backed off for a while after that, but lately he’d begun picking fights with Brick again, and threatened to start hitting Angie again, too. Brick towered over his father now, and he was protective of his mother. Angie knew that no good could come of that. There’d be no peace as long as Bull and Brick McGinty lived in the same house.

  She pulled a clean rag out of the drawer and ran it under cold water. “Let me just clean you up,” she said, reaching up to dab Brick’s eye. “You don’t want Ellie seeing you with blood on your face.” At the sound of Ellie’s name, Brick surrendered. He slouched into a chair at the table and raised his face toward his mother. “Her grandparents don’t think I’m good enough for her, Ma. They want me to stay away from her.”

  Angie dabbed at the cut, then leaned in and kissed him between the eyes.

  “That’s all Wayne, I’ll bet,” she said. “He doesn’t think anyone’s good enough for his little girl.” She sat opposite her son and grabbed an apple out of the bowl on the table. She rolled it toward him. “Stick that in your pocket.”

  “Why don’t they like me, Ma?” Brick said.

  “The Fetters? Oh, honey, they’re just trying to protect Ellie from more hurt. She was a child when her parents abandoned her. Their own son treated her like trash for the dump.”

  “Don’t talk about Ellie like that, Ma.”

  Only at the mention of Ellie did her son’s eyes start to tear up. How he loved that girl. “I’m sorry, honey,” she said. “I know you love her, and this is hard.”

  “There have to be some good fathers out there,” he said. He jabbed his finger toward the door. “They can’t all be like that. Like him. And like Ellie’s dad. Like your father, too.”

  What could she have been thinking, confessing such hard secrets to her child? He was barely ten at the time, and Bull had just whipped him so hard he’d wet his pants in front of the Matthews boys. He was so humiliated he ran into the field and didn’t come home until after supper.

  She had been desperate to ease his shame, to make him see that she really did understand how he felt, and that God would help him through it. “I know what this feels like,” she had told him that n
ight. “I know how you feel.” She’d described how her own father used to beat her till she peed, and left her covered in bruises. “For nothing,” she’d whispered to him that night as Brick softly wept. “For no reason at all.”

  Angie would never forget the look of betrayal on her little boy’s face. “And you went and married someone just like him, Ma?” he’d said, tears running down his face. “Why’d you go and do that? Why didn’t God stop you?” Angie had no answer for him.

  “Ma?”

  Angie startled now. “I’m sorry, honey. What?”

  “I said I’ve got to get to school.”

  Angie grabbed the edge of the table and rose to her feet. Every inch of her ached all the time now. “Press the rag to your cut while you drive,” she said. “The longer you keep it there, the less likely people will notice it when you get to school.”

  “Ellie will notice,” Brick said, standing up. “Ellie notices everything.” He grabbed his jacket off the hook, pulled it on, and stuck the apple in his pocket. “Seeya, Ma.”

  Angie stood at the door and watched Brick climb into his truck and pull away. A cloud of gravel dust rose and scattered over the snow. Angie clutched the small gold cross dangling on the chain around her neck. “And wherever they do not receive you,” she whispered, “when you leave that town, shake off the dust from your feet as a testimony against them.”

  Her fingers traced the lines of the cross. “Please, God, watch over my boy. Keep him safe.”

  Ellie shivered in the school parking lot, jumping from one foot to the other, her bare legs blotchy and red. “C’mon, Brick,” she whispered into the wool scarf around her neck. “Where are you?”

  “Ellie!”

  Ellie turned and saw Becca Gilley waving a bright purple mitten. “Bell’s about to ring. You’re going to be late.” Ellie clutched her books closer to her chest and looked at the road. No truck. No Brick.

  “I’m coming,” she yelled over her shoulder. “Just one more minute.” The sound of busybody Becca’s saddle shoes slapping against the pavement grew louder. “Whew,” Becca said, leaning on Ellie’s shoulder. “I can’t breathe in this weather.” She tugged on Ellie’s sleeve. “You have got to stop waiting around for Brick. He’s supposed to stay away from you. You could get him in trouble.”

  Ellie shrugged off Becca’s hand and thought, not for the first time, that she looked like a fifty-four-year-old teenager in her blue, cat-eye frames. “So now everybody knows my business? How did you find out?”

  “Like you weren’t going to tell me anyway. Daddy said Brick’s father was carryin’ on about it last night at O’Doole’s. Said you had some nerve thinking you were better than Brick when your mother is—”

  Ellie turned toward her. “My mother is what?”

  Becca looked away. “Never mind. He’s a mean man, Ellie, that Bull McGinty. Daddy says he’s always tryin’ to pick a fight. Talks terrible about his own son, too. Says he should’ve drowned him when he was born. Can you imagine saying that about your own son?”

  The snow was coming down harder now. “Becca, next time you’re thinking of saying something to make someone feel bad, maybe think again.”

  “I’m sorry, El. I was just sharing information.”

  “Nobody understands Brick like I do,” Ellie said. “I know who he really is.”

  “Oh, El. Don’t do this. Brick’s not long for this town. Everyone knows he’s going to get a basketball scholarship and be the first basketball player from Jefferson High to go play at college.”

  Ellie turned her back to Becca and looked out at the road. “So, he has plans. What makes you think I don’t have plans, too? That we don’t have plans together?”

  Both of them turned to the sound of wheels crunching on packed snow. Ellie waved at Brick. “Oh, boy,” Becca said. “Now you’re going to be late for sure. I’ll see you inside.”

  As soon as Ellie saw Brick’s truck, she went from worried to wounded. So what if Grandpa said Brick couldn’t pick her up anymore? Did that mean he could just wander in anytime he wanted? He should have been here a half hour ago. “If you were in a hurry to see me,” she said. “Which you obviously aren’t.” One look, she told herself. She’d let him get one good look at her, and then she’d turn and run off to class.

  Brick waved at her through the windshield as she raised her eyebrows and jutted out her chin in silent reprimand. She turned and started stomping toward the school’s front entrance. She heard his truck door open and slam shut.

  “Ellie!”

  She kept walking, but slowed down at the sound of his running.

  “Ellie, please.”

  Please? That didn’t sound like Brick McGinty.

  She turned around and saw blood crusted over his swollen left eye, and a bruise under it pooling in a deep shade of violet. “Brick, what happened to you?” She pulled off a glove and started to reach for his swollen eye. He dodged her hand and pulled her into a hug. “Nothing. It looks worse than it feels.”

  “Who did this to you?”

  “I told you. It’s nothing.”

  Ellie looked up at his face. “He did this. Your father.” She licked her fingers and rubbed his cheek. “You’ve still got blood on your face.”

  “Let’s get you inside, Pint. Your legs are so red, they look like they’re going to snap in two.”

  Ellie stepped back to look at him. He was wearing his letterman’s jacket, but no gloves or hat, no scarf. The ridges in his red hair were sculpted with his usual dab of Brylcreem, and looked sharp as ice. “I don’t care if I freeze to death,” she said as she unwound her scarf and tossed it around his neck.

  “I don’t need your pity.”

  “Good,” she said, forcing a smile. “Because I’m not offering it. You’re my mighty Brick. Let’s go inside. We can talk later.” The second bell rang. Brick squeezed her hand and with his other hand grabbed the leather strap buckled around her books. “C’mon, we gotta get in there or both of us will be banned from tonight’s game.”

  Across the street, Wayne Fetters’s breath clouded the windows as he sat in his pickup truck, waiting to see when his granddaughter would go inside. He saw her shade her eyes as she waited in the parking lot, talking to Becca Gilley. He saw her stomp her feet in the snow trying to keep her legs warm. He saw her drop her books and run into the arms of Bull McGinty’s boy.

  Ellie rising on tiptoes to touch his face. Looping her arm through his. Kissing him, twice, before running with him into the building.

  Wayne Fetters saw it all.

  “Goddamn him,” he said, turning the key in the ignition and pulling away.

  Ada wiped her hands on her apron as she walked into the living room and sat in the rocking chair facing her husband. The chair creaked as she lowered herself into it with an audible sigh. Wayne raised the evening newspaper a little higher in front of his face.

  “You know I’m sitting here, Wayne,” she said. “And we both know there’s no way you can’t hear that child crying her heart out upstairs.” Wayne shifted in his chair and rustled the paper, saying nothing.

  Ellie started pounding again on her bedroom door, her every wail punctuated with Sheba’s howls. “Let me come down! Please let me out! Grandma! Grandpa!”

  Ada covered her face with her hands. “Oh my Lord. I can’t take this a minute longer. Wayne, you can’t keep her up there forever.”

  Wayne flipped down a corner of the paper. “She was kissing him, Ada. I saw it with my own eyes this morning. Not even an hour after you told her she was not to see that boy again, she was holding his hand and kissing him. I saw her.”

  He rattled his paper again and tried three times to snap it upright before throwing it to the floor. He reached for the radio perched next to them on a step stool Ada had made out of coffee cans and upholstery remnants. He turned it on and fidgeted with the dia
l.

  Ada rested her hand on his. “We need to talk, Wayne.”

  Wayne stared at his wife’s hand. This was not like his Ada. She’d always known when to let him be. They had their understandings. He didn’t touch a kitchen appliance except to repair it. Never complained about any meal she cooked or budget decision she made. In return, she stayed away from the toolshed, left the driving to him, and trusted Wayne to pick their programs on the radio. Not once had she ever so much as suggested he adjust the volume.

  “Thought we’d listen to a little Gunsmoke.” He locked eyes with his wife and saw a stranger looking back at him. He turned off the radio. “Go on,” he said. “Say your bit.”

  “She’s still a child, Wayne. A sweet girl. You act as if she’s suddenly this sinister creature trying to betray us. Like she’s—”

  “Grandpa!” Ellie yelled. “Please let me come downstairs!”

  Wayne pointed to the ceiling. “Remember how much I didn’t want her livin’ with us nine years ago? This is what I worried about. It wasn’t that I didn’t want that little girl in our house.” He pointed to the ceiling again. “I didn’t want this.”

  Ada pulled a hankie from her pocket and dabbed at her eyes. “This isn’t like you, Wayne. Do you ever look at Ellie’s face, see how hard she’s always trying to please us. She’s spent the last nine years afraid you’d kick her out, Wayne. Our own granddaughter.”

  Wayne leaned forward. “I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen you cry, Ada. You know I’d never do that to her. Why didn’t you ever say anything to me?”

  Ada pulled off her horn-rimmed glasses and wiped them with the hem of her apron. She laid them on her lap and looked up at her husband. “I guess a little part of me is afraid you’re going to kick her out, too. I couldn’t bear it, Wayne. I couldn’t bear to lose her.”

  They heard Ellie wailing again. “Please, Grandpa!”

  They looked up at the ceiling. “She was kissing that McGinty boy, Ada. A McGinty.”

  “She’s a teenager, and she’s in love. Don’t you remember us at that age?”